All My Dead
by northernexposure
Summary: Everything changes. Nick/Stephen, Nick/Claudia, Nick/Jenny


All My Dead

Author's note: This is really quite bitter and unhappy, but it demanded to be written.

_of all my dead its you_

_who come to me unfinished_

Adrienne Rich, _A Woman Dead in her Forties_

Everything changes. In the blink of an eye, the world you knew so well can become alien, hostile. It doesn't take much. One wrong turn, one wrong decision. One wrong key turned in one wrong lock. Nick knows this, knew this even before the universe inverted itself and spat him back out with memories that no one of use shared.

Change is unstoppable. Change is inevitable. It's what made the Earth what it is today. It's what formed the histories he has spent his life uncovering, understanding.

Nick knows this, but it doesn't make it right. Six months ago the world was quantifiable, finite. Now, right now, standing at Stephen's graveside, he is just as lost as he was the first time he saw an anomaly. Nothing will ever be the same again. Nothing ever can. Nothing ever should.

The vicar is spouting meaningless platitudes that Nick is busy drowning out. It's funny how our last moments in the realm of the living are presided over by strangers who can't possibly understand the things that made us, us. Doctors and priests, both prized for their ability to make everyone equal, everyone… good. A doctor will treat you however you sustained your injury. You never hear a vicar speak ill of the dead, whatever sort of bastard they may be burying.

Stephen had flaws. The last few months had proven that. But Nick had loved him regardless. Not that Stephen had known. Wasn't that always the way? We wait too long to say the only things we really want to make clear. We wait until it's too late.

_I should have learnt by now. _

First Helen.

Then Claudia.

Now Stephen.

When had he ever told any of them what he'd really been meaning to say? He'd blasted Stephen with anger over his affair with Helen. He'd cut him out when he should have kept him close. Maybe if he had, they wouldn't be burying him now. If he'd overcome his pathetic pride and hurt, maybe Stephen would still be alive. Maybe Nick wouldn't have had to see him die, see that vibrant life spilled so pointlessly, so brutally. The image of Stephen's violent end was seared forever on the inside of Nick's eyelids. It burned in his mind every time he shut his eyes. And Nick was grateful for it. It reminded him of what he should have done. It was his penance.

Together they could have stood against Helen. Apart they were no match for her.

_I should have warned him. I, who of all people knew what she was capable of. I knew she'd tear him apart. I knew, because I'd been there. But I did nothing. I let him go. _

_I'm always letting people go. _

There were so many things he wanted to say to Stephen, things that he'd wanted to say for years, but hadn't.

_I'm not ready to let you go. My friend, my rock. _

But of course, he didn't have a choice. That's what change did to you. It turned you around when you least expected it, before you had a chance to prepare yourself.

Before you had a chance to say the things you'd always been meaning to say.

Beside him stands Jenny, demure in a black suit. She's quiet, and it's not just the pain of the day. Something's changed in her, too, and he knows it. He saw it in her eyes as she'd told him she was no longer engaged. He'd winced, careful not to give anything away, anxious for Jenny to steer the conversation in another direction. Helen was listening, and though he'd promised Jenny she was safe, he hadn't really known how true that was. Who knew what Helen would do if she read something undesirable in Nick's response to Jenny's revelation?

As he'd once told Stephen, Helen didn't take rejection well.

As it was, his indifference had silenced Jenny. For a few moments her barriers had been down, but she'd thrown them back up again the second he hadn't followed where she was leading. What had he seen in her eyes when she'd told him she'd been feeling 'differently'? He wasn't sure. Was he way off beam, or could he just not take in what she was hinting at? Maybe he didn't want to. Maybe he couldn't take another change right now.

The vicar was drawing to a close. In his pocket, Nick fingered the photograph, another reminder of how irrevocably the world could alter.

But he couldn't ignore that Jenny had softened. It had happened gradually, starting, possibly, with that night he'd dragged her out of the Thames. Or rather, with their brief conversation afterwards, where he'd slipped and called her Claudia – and she'd let him. He couldn't help it, she'd looked so much like her other self just then – damp hair curling around her face as it dried, make-up washed away. Then she'd added _that_ smile, _that_ laugh as he'd joked – obliquely - about the vicissitudes of his love life. For the first time he'd looked at her and felt his heart constrict, just a little. They'd almost lost her. _He'd_ almost lost her. He wasn't sure what that would have done to him, but at that moment he'd realised it would have done _something_.

That in itself was disturbing. What did that say about him? What did that say about what he felt for Claudia? Too much, it had all been too much. So he'd ignored it. He'd pushed it away. He was good at doing that.

But slowly, surely, Jenny had drawn closer. Just a fraction. He'd seen through her brashness more often. Her smile was warmer, less calculating.

They'd grown close enough that when he knew it was her that had walked into their trap, his battered heart had stopped completely. Jenny, betray them? Betray _him_? Had he been blinded by her face?

He'd been proud of himself, handling that gun. Holding it to her head as if he could have looked her in the eye and pulled the trigger. Inside he was already dead. He couldn't take another betrayal. What the hell was life for if this is what happened in it?

First Helen.

Then Stephen.

Now Jenny.

The wave of relief when she'd proven herself had flushed him out so thoroughly he could have collapsed right there.

Since then, oddly, they'd drifted even closer. Not that anyone else would notice. Perhaps the change was in him rather than Jenny. That rush of relief had opened his heart, and now he was finding it difficult to close. He told himself they were just becoming friends. It didn't cancel out Claudia. He wasn't trying to replace her. Anyway, she had a fiancé.

The vicar stopped speaking, and Nick realised the service was over. He watched as the first clod of Earth rained down on Stephen's coffin. His throat closed, but there were no more tears. He'd cried them all out against that door as Stephen's life became forfeit to Helen's plans.

_I'm not ready to let you go. _

People began to drift away from the graveside, but he stayed. He felt Jenny beside him, quiet, patient. Waiting for him. He was glad of it. He spent too much time alone now. Back when things had been normal, Stephen had owned a key to his university office. The younger man would let himself in, pour himself a drink, make himself at home. Often were the times that Nick would finish a lecture and head back to find Stephen already there. Reading maybe, or playing the inappropriate game of indoor golf they'd invented one bored afternoon.

Nick had always had a sneaking suspicion that Stephen was checking up on him. Making sure he didn't become a total recluse. After Helen's disappearance, Nick had spent more and more time holed up in that room, alone, shunning any form of a social life. Stephen's visits were, for a while, his only form of contact apart from seminars, which he kept to the barest minimum. Without Stephen, he would have sunk without a trace.

In that room, they had laughed, debated, set the world to rights. Stephen had brought him his heartbreaks, his theories, recounted his adventures.

_I never told you how much that meant to me. I never told you how much I needed that. How much I needed you. _

Nick squeezed the bridge of his nose. Despite everything that had happened since the world flipped on its axis, Stephen was still Stephen. It was only Nick's anger that had stopped his office at the ARC becoming as welcoming as his one at the university had been. It was his pride that had cut off Stephen's every attempt to reconcile – properly reconcile – their fractured understanding of each other. Every time Stephen has offered to buy him a drink, he'd said no. Every time Stephen had left a note on his desk, he'd ignored it. Eventually the offers had stopped, the attempted contact had ceased. Stephen had stopped reaching out. No wonder he'd welcomed Helen back. What was there to stop him?

Forever now would their conversations be one-sided. He knew this from experience. After Helen had vanished, he'd continued talking to her. Just in his mind, uttering sentences as if she could hear, as if they were in one of their interminable arguments. But of course she never answered.

Now it would be Stephen who stayed silent when he spoke. Nick let out a ragged sigh, and jumped when he felt a hand brush his. He glanced down to see Jenny's fingers curl around his, just for a moment, before slipping away. He didn't reach out to bring them back again. There was a numbness spreading in his chest.

Turning, he walked slowly towards the cars. Change. It happened constantly, suddenly, without warning and without mercy. It took you in its jaws and shook you for all its worth, devoured you without a moment's thought.

Change happened when you least expected it. And you could never go back, not really, not even if you moved Heaven and Earth to replace what you had lost. He thumbed the edge of the photograph in his pocket.

"Drink?"

Jenny's voice drifted in the peace of the graveyard. For a moment he didn't answer, and she must have taken that as a no because she slammed those defences up again, too fast for his silence not to have mattered.

"Some other time, maybe." Her eyes, avoiding his.

Truth be told, he couldn't do it. Not right now. He couldn't sit opposite her and see that face, so close, such a poignant reminder of just how the world had changed, and would no doubt change again.

We always wait. What are we waiting for? For something better? For those things we remember but can never get back? For the right time?

Under his fingers, the photograph curled. He looked around him, at all these graves. All these people whose deaths changed those yet living. How many of them had left things unsaid? How many bitter regrets lingered in this air?

_I should have learnt by now._

"Yes. That would be nice," he said then, looking her in the eye, watching her tentative smile spread to their depths.

For a second he saw her heart, even as his own cracked with a new grief. The world had changed. Claudia was gone. Stephen was gone. They weren't coming back.

Jenny walked away as Lester called.

Under his hand, the photograph curled. He took it out, looking at it for a moment before carefully, deliberately, tearing it in half, and then quarters. He couldn't bury her, but he had to say goodbye. He didn't want to. He didn't want to let go, any more than he wanted to let go of Stephen. But it was too late. The world had changed, and he couldn't change it back.

_Here's a truth, Stephen. Here's what I should have said long ago. I loved you, my friend, my rock. You kept me whole. And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry._

_Here's a truth, Claudia. I knew you for too short a time. I lost you, but I will not lose the memory of you. _

He opened his fingers, letting the wind take all that was left and scatter her gently on the breeze.

[END


End file.
